Virtually at your service!

Main menu

Monthly Archives: March 2008

More and more attorneys and law firms are taking advantage of the 365/24/7 opportunities to showcase their practice’s services and expertise by building and publishing a website. Here’s a list of practical items for consideration by anyone building a website:

Buy your own domain name.Make it a .com address.Use your name with PC or law; combine last names or use the firm specialty for a suitable domain (i.e., workerscomplawyer.com).Try not to use initials, hyphans or unintelligible spellings. Where do you research/buy domain names? www.godaddy.com and www.register.com are two reputable registrars.

Have fresh, clean content with no large files or lengthy downloads.Picture and sound files are notoriously large. If you use a flash intro – lose it!Flash intros not only cause very lengthy load times, they may disrupt search engines from properly spidering your website and they are annoying to boot!

Have professionally edited text that has been proof read.Make sure that all links and pages are tested from an “outside” computer.To clean text, block/copy into Notebook and then block/copy from Notebook into the on line editor.Notebook strips away any stray code.

Use language that speaks to your audience, have clear and easy to follow navigation, professional headshots of firm personnel and prominently post the firm address and phone number.For SEO purposes it doesn’t hurt to publish a Google Map on your contact page.Statistically speaking, you will get more contacts if you also list an e-mail on your landing/home page.However, for spam purposes, I recommend that you use a generic address such as “contact” or “info” @yourdomain.com

You also want to make sure that you provide fresh content to your website on a regular basis.Some painless content can be found by listing partner speaking engagements, adding published articles or a copy of the firm’s newsletter.

If you do not wish to learn how to build and/or maintain a website, you have lots of options. You can hire a legal specific company such as Next Client or small firms such as Venue Communications. There are also lots of web designers and coders listed as Virtual Assistants at both the IVAA and VANA websites.